FILM; Greetings From the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema

By DENNIS LIM

Published: November 26, 2006

IT is often said that artists represent the conscience of a nation. In Austria that conscience tends to be expressed with a certain amount of contempt. Elfriede Jelinek, the 2004 Nobel laureate for literature and an unblinking chronicler of human cruelty, once called her homeland a ''criminal nation.'' Accepting her Nobel, she stressed that the prize was in no way ''a flower in Austria's buttonhole.'' Her fellow writer and playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989, went further. In his will he asked that none of his works be published or performed in Austria after his death.

True to form, the salient quality of Austrian film's new wave is its willingness to confront the abject and emphasize the negative. In recent years this tiny country with a population the size of New York City's has become something like the world capital of feel-bad cinema. State of the Nation, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's survey of new Austrian film (which runs Wednesday through Dec. 7), sheds some light on the complex realities underlying the stereotype.

The director who has done the most for the international visibility of Austrian cinema is Michael Haneke. Since ''The Seventh Continent'' in 1989 he has been mounting stern, analytical attacks on bourgeois complacency. The film that sealed his reputation, ''The Piano Teacher'' (2001), was an adaptation of Ms. Jelinek's best-known novel. Set in the rarefied world of Viennese high culture, it functions equally as a psychodrama and a scornful allegory for the national character. Beneath her veneer of refinement and discipline, the piano teacher is a self-loathing bundle of wayward desires.

Mr. Haneke is represented in the series with a relatively obscure film, an intriguing if somewhat pedantic version of Kafka's classic ''The Castle,'' made for Austrian television in 1997. Fresh off the success of last year's ''Cach?' he is currently working on an English-language remake of one of his most notorious provocations, ''Funny Games'' (1997), in which a vacationing family is terrorized by two teenage sociopaths.

The younger filmmakers who have followed in Mr. Haneke's wake do not necessarily share his punitive streak, but they almost all have a taste for confrontation.

''We don't want to only satisfy the audience,'' said Barbara Albert, whose first feature, ''Northern Skirts'' (1999), is being screened in the series. ''Sometimes we also want to hurt them and make them think.''

Alexander Horwath, the director of the Austrian Film Museum, said many contemporary Austrian filmmakers subscribed to ''a relatively deterministic or depressive or at least pessimistic view of the world.''

That pessimism sometimes extends far beyond local matters. Austria is home to the emerging genre of the intercontinental documentary: travelogues with a global awareness and the frequent-flier miles to show for it. Nikolaus Geyrhalter's four-and-a-half-hour ''Elsewhere,'' also part of the series, is the result of a colossal endeavor that took him to a different corner of the planet (Greenland, the Sahara) for each month of the year 2000. (Mr. Geyrhalter's latest film, ''Our Daily Bread,'' an eerie, wordless meditation on the antiseptic surreality of industrial food production, is currently playing at Anthology Film Archives.)

Michael Glawogger, the most versatile figure on the Austrian film scene, has made a few globe-trotting documentaries, including last year's ''Workingman's Death,'' which observes some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs on earth (coal mining, transporting sulfur on an active volcano). His new fiction feature, ''Slumming,'' will have its New York premiere at Lincoln Center this week. Written with Ms. Albert, the film begins as a comedy about rich prankster kids who engage in ''slum tourism'' -- frequenting Vienna's seamier night spots -- but concludes in an actual Indonesian shantytown.

Mr. Geyrhalter's and Mr. Glawogger's films, which combine a poetic sensibility and political intent, seem like a reaction to Austria's geographic and social insularity. Mr. Horwath said the filmmakers have come under fire precisely for venturing far afield. ''Some critics argue that they should turn towards Austrian reality and not escape pressing local issues,'' he said.

But Mr. Glawogger said travel was crucial to his method. ''I see black and white better by observing its contrast with distinct colors,'' he wrote in an e-mail from Nepal, where he was researching a project about prostitution. ''And I can understand democracy only by exploring the ways of an oppressive political system.''

Switching effortlessly between documentary and fiction, Mr. Glawogger also typifies another kind of boundary crossing: a formal hybridity that Mr. Horwath called Austrian cinema's ''most unique and important asset.''

A prime example is the work of Ulrich Seidl, the subject of a retrospective at the BAM Rose Cinemas in 2002. He started out as a documentarian, but his films have increasingly blurred the line between the real and the staged. He arranges his documentary subjects in posed tableaus and uses nonactors in his fictional films. The series includes his 1999 film ''Models,'' a discomfiting, unglamorous look at eating disorders and drug habits.